Plaxo Pushes for "Open Social Web"

Business Wire, July 18, 2007

Endorses and Implements Key Open Standards, OpenID and Microformats

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. -- Bolstering its support of the open social web, Plaxo[R] today endorsed key emerging standards for online identity and personal information management, OpenID and microformats. The company has updated the recently released beta of Plaxo 3.0 to include support for these open standards and has published an OpenID implementation guide to accelerate its adoption across the industry, available online at http://www.plaxo.com/api/openid.> "Plaxo shares the vision that you should be able to take your identity and personal information with you everywhere you go across the social web," said Joseph Smarr, Chief Platform Architect, Plaxo. "By embracing OpenID and microformats, open standards that have blossomed out of the user-advocate community, we hope to accelerate the emergence of a truly open social web."

With this announcement, Plaxo joins industry leaders AOL, Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, VeriSign, 37Signals and others who actively support the OpenID standard. OpenID is a decentralized single sign-on system. For sites honoring OpenID, users do not need to generate and remember yet another username and password. Instead, they can sign-in with personal URL that they have registered with any OpenID Provider. Microformats are standards-based data formats that identify specific information on a webpage such as a calendar event or contact information and allow it to be easily shared with other services.

"Plaxo's commitment to open interoperability standards like OpenID and microformats is truly a great thing," said David Recordon, co-author of OpenID specifications. "By becoming an OpenID Consumer, Plaxo is contributing to building out the total network of sites world-wide where OpenID can be used."

Starting today, any of the over 120 million people who have an OpenID can use their OpenID credentials to sign-up for or sign-in to the all-new version of Plaxo at http://beta.plaxo.com. The company also intends to become an OpenID provider, offering members the ability to use the personal information they have entrusted to Plaxo to securely access any OpenID-enabled site and to sign-up for new services without having to re-enter their information and remember yet another password.

In addition, the company has implemented the microformats hCard and hCal as part of the all-new Plaxo 3.0 making it even easier for members to share information and support more mashups in the future. Public profiles, a new feature of the service, now use the hCard format for contact info, giving users the ability use their profile information on any of the growing list of services that consume hCard data. Public or shared calendars, also new features, now display events with hCal formatting, giving users the ability to leverage their calendar in other event-related services that support hCal.

About Plaxo Inc.

Plaxo is the creator of the "smart address book" service that helps over 15 million members around the world stay in touch with the people they know and care about. Serving customers since 2003, Plaxo is a privately held company, funded by leading investment and technology firms -- Sequoia Capital, Globespan Capital Partners, Harbinger Venture Management, DAG Ventures, and Cisco Systems -- and by individual investors Ram Shriram and Tim Koogle. The company offers services directly to consumers and through a wide range of service provider partnerships. More information on the company is available at www.plaxo.com.

Plaxo is a registered trademark of Plaxo, Inc. Other company and product names may be trademarks of their respective owners.